rev. dave:So was it the comic genre that influenced fantasy or the other way around? The concept of magic is easily translated into super powers.

According to everything I've read, it all happened at the same time. The initial codifiers of modern genre literature all happened during the pulp era in the 20s, 30s & 40s. The four big things to come out of that era were science fiction, fantasy, horror and the western. Previous to this, everything was mostly a combination of those four and the big 19th century literary popular genres: the romance, the adventure story & the mystery. Golden age comics were about everything, but Superman really did a lot to solidify the format as being an arguably science fiction oriented one. Early Superman comics even had a feature later played more frequently in the Silver Age in all comics where Superman's various powers were given faux-scientific explanations in aside panels. High fantasy was already sort of a thing previous to the pulps and golden age comics, but if you read them they are mainly mythological or historical pastiches which don't contain a lot of elements modern fantasy has until The Hobbit and Conan. Fantasy only really becomes popular again in the 1950s, which by then comics themselves are committed to the four main pulp genres they helped popularize.